Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee told Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk that he would not back President Donald Trump’s House-passed “one big, beautiful bill” in its present form.
Trump gave Senate Republicans permission to enact significant reforms to the bill on Sunday as some GOP senators are warning that the package would not pass without major changes. Lee, on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” said he would oppose it as it stands, echoing Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s spending concerns he raised with Kirk on Tuesday when noting his own position against the present bill.
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“In the Big, Beautiful Bill’s current composition as it is in its current form, would you currently vote for it?” Kirk asked.
“At the moment, no. In fact, there’s no chance it could pass the Senate right now, but we do have two legislative chambers. It’s passed the House, come over to the Senate. The Big, Beautiful Bill is big isn’t yet as beautiful as it needs to be, but there’s still time to fix it. And the Senate version is going to be more aggressive,” Lee told Kirk. “It can and I think it has or else it’s not going to pass. Now, look, the Republicans in the House gave us some good wins. This bill extends the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to make sure that we don’t end up with a $4 trillion tax bomb going off and exploding in front of the American people, it helps to revitalize the military, it funds the completion of the southern border wall, helps fund the crackdown on illegal immigration. Those are all great things.”
However, the senator told Kirk the bill does not sufficiently mitigate government spending.
“We’ve gotta deliver more than that though. And we increased spending by like 58% just our last five years, just since the pandemic. So we got to address the spending crisis to a greater degree than this bill does,” he said. “Under this bill, under the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] projections, we’re still looking at $2.2 trillion a year on average in deficits over the next ten years. That’s not good enough. We gotta get to a point where we can balance it during this president’s time in office.”
GOP Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky are also among the fiscal hawks affecting the deliberations regarding spending deficits. Johnson noted Lee and Scott as senators who are seeking additional spending cuts in the bill.
“If they brought it to the floor like right now, there’s not a chance it’ll get the 51 votes it needs … Look, we all know we have to balance the budget,” Scott told Kirk. “Look, we know that it’s getting harder to sell our treasuries, we know interest rates are going up. We want to get interest rates down, we can get inflation under control. That means balance the budget.”
Johnson is pushing for the government to go back to pre-pandemic spending levels — a nearly $6 trillion reduction — and describes the present bill as “completely unacceptable.”
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